1 collectd - System information collection daemon
2 =================================================
3 http://collectd.org/
5 About
6 -----
8 collectd is a small daemon which collects statistics about a computer's
9 usage and writes then into RRD files.
12 Features
13 --------
15 * collectd is able to collect the following data:
17 - apache
18 Apache server utilization: Number of bytes transfered, number of
19 requests handled and detailed scoreboard statistics
21 - apcups
22 APC UPS Daemon: UPS charge, load, input/output/battery voltage, etc.
24 - apple_sensors
25 Sensors in Macs running Mac OS X / Darwin: Temperature, fanspeed and
26 voltage sensors.
28 - battery
29 Batterycharge, -current and volatage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
30 batteries.
32 - cpu
33 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
34 states.
36 - cpufreq
37 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
39 - df
40 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
42 - disk
43 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
44 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
46 - dns
47 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
48 transfered.
50 - email
51 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
52 See collectd-email(5).
54 - entropy
55 Amount of entropy available to the system.
57 - exec
58 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
59 See collectd-exec(5).
61 - hddtemp
62 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
64 - interface
65 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
66 interface.
68 - iptables
69 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
70 iptables rule.
72 - irq
73 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
75 - load
76 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
78 - mbmon
79 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
80 using mbmon(1).
82 - memory
83 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
84 buffer cache and free.
86 - multimeter
87 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
88 M-4650CR'.
90 - mysql
91 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
92 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
94 - network
95 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
96 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
97 plugin of choice for that.
99 - nfs
100 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
101 NFSv3 right now.
103 - ntp
104 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
106 - nut
107 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
108 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
110 - perl
111 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
112 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitary values using this
113 API. See collectd-perl(5).
115 - ping
116 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
117 host.
119 - processes
120 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
122 - sensors
123 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
124 fan rotation speeds.
126 - serial
127 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
129 - swap
130 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
132 - tape
133 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
135 - users
136 Users currently logged in.
138 - vserver
139 System ressources used by Linux VServers.
140 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
142 - wireless
143 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
145 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
146 plugins:
148 - csv
149 Write to comma seperated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
150 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
151 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
153 - network
154 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
155 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
157 - perl
158 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
159 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
160 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
162 - rrdtool
163 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
164 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
165 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
166 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
167 system load a lot.
169 - unixsock
170 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
171 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
172 done.
174 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
175 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
177 - logfile
178 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
180 - syslog
181 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanismn, syslog.
183 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
184 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
185 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
186 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
187 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
188 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
189 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
191 * Once set up, hardly any maintenence is neccessary. Setup is kept as easy
192 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
195 Operation
196 ---------
198 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
199 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
200 for a list of options and a syntax description.
202 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
203 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
205 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since only
206 root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
207 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
208 used to overwrite valuable files!
210 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
211 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
212 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
213 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
214 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
215 solution please share it with us.
217 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
218 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
219 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
220 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
223 Prerequisites
224 -------------
226 To compile collectd from source you will need:
228 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
230 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
231 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
232 etc) the collectd is parellelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
233 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
234 platforms.
236 * libcurl (optional)
237 If you want to use the `apache' plugin
239 * libiptc (optional)
240 For querying iptables counters.
242 * libmysqlclient (optional)
244 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
245 can be used)
246 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
248 * libpcap (optional)
249 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
251 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
252 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
253 will send it's values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
254 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Seperated Values)
255 instead.
257 * libsensors (optional)
258 To read from `lm_sensors'.
260 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
261 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided
262 by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
263 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
265 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
266 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
268 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo
269 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
271 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework
272 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
273 particular.
275 Author
276 ------
278 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
279 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
280 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').